Pain Attention
A Closer Look into Pain Management
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Measuring
Pain

The Patient Perspective

patient history

Patient History

Initial assessment of pain should include: 1

  • Characteristics of pain (e.g., duration, location, intensity, quality, exacerbating/alleviating factors)
  • Current and past pain management strategies and outcomes
  • Past and present medical problems that may be relevant to pain
  • Family history
  • Current and past psychosocial issues or factors
  • The impact on daily life
  • The patient’s expectations for pain management

Subjective Perceptions Of Pain

As pain is subjective, there are no satisfactory objective measures of pain. Therefore, to reiterate the above, self-report of pain is the best and most reliable indicator of how much pain the person is suffering.

A physician should accept this self-report, unless there are good reasons to doubt it. Moreover, as pain can exist even when no physical cause can be located, such pain must not always be attributed to psychological causes.1

subjective perception
MC-I305-16-2024
Data preparation: January 2024

  1. Pain: Current Understanding of Assessment, Management and Treatments. Developed by NPC as part of a collaborative project with JCAHO (2001)

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